VFS Dinner Dance 2006

Last Saturday was our company's annual dinner dance. This year it was held at one of those shed things near Docklands. Not quite as extravagant as last year's party at the Grand Hyatt hotel but still enjoyable. This year, our table dressed up as Zorro. Here I am doing my best Asian Zorro impression. I wanted to use the forks instead of the fencing sword because it was really cool to be able to throw the forks up and catch them again.



Dinner consisted of alternating dishes between people on the table. For entrees, I got the Prawn, avocado and cucumber salad with piquant dill sauce. It was presented beautifully but tasted rather bland. The prawns lacked any flavour and no other flavours were distinguishable except for the cream texture of the avocado.



Alternating people got the other entree. Thanks to Jessie for letting me try a bit of all her dishes throughout the night. The other entree was Palm sugar glazed chicken with spicy citrus salad. Again, full marks for presentation. It looked wonderful with all the different colours and shapes. However, the chicken was again rather flavourless. The salad was a very poor imitation of a Thai style salad.



For mains, I hoped I got the Roasted eye fillet on herb potato cake with pink pepper sauce or I would have swapped. I did get the eye fillet, but was extremely disappointed. The beef was way overcooked and extremely tough, ruining a great cut of meat. The potato cake was not good, and the beautiful pink pepper looked excellent but didn't work well with the beef at all.



The other mains dish Pan fried rockling with sauteed Asian vegetables and citrus with ginger sauce. I didn't like the ginger sauce or the vegetables, but the fish was very good. It was cooked well, firm but not crumbling. It had a good fresh flavour.



Side dishes consisted of Roasted potatoes with rosemary and garlic. A classic accompaniment to any meal. Potatoes were cooked just right, crispy on the outside but still moist on the inside. The seasonal vegetables were simply steamed. The rocket and pear salad sounded good on paper but the pears were not ripe so had hardly any flavour.



Finally desserts were little servings of Lime tartlets (not shown), Lady finger donuts with warm chocolate sauce (not shown), Dark chocolate mousse with coffee sauce, and Pistachi pannacotta. I was thinking the Pistachio pannacotta would be the highlight of the night, but it turned out to be flavourless as well. The mousse was actually very good. I missed out on trying the donuts unfortunately. The lime tartlets were ok.





Finally, to round out the night, there were Australian cheeses. I liked the Brie the best. Although the honey "cheese" was very interesting. It tasted like honey that had been hardened together, so I don't know if it is technically a cheese.



The food looked great, but didn't taste that great. Still, I had a really fun night with all my friends from work. It's good to see what people are like outside of work.